Rem Koolhaas Project on the city What was the project on the city? a product of his position as professor at Harvard University, What did it entail? students analysing what others would regard as "non-cities", What do you mean by non-city? highly functional despite a lack of infrastructure. Did it have to meet certain requirements? I don't know. Are there any other interesting aspects about this article? Koolhaas mobilizes what he regards as the omnipotent forces of urbanism into unique design forms
What omnipotent forces?
What are omnipotent forces that Rem Koolhaas mobilizes?
Koolhaas's next landmark publications were a product of his position as professor at Harvard University, in the Design school's "Project on the City"; firstly the 720-page Mutations, followed by The Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping (2002) and The Great Leap Forward (2002). All three books involved Koolhaas's students analysing what others would regard as "non-cities", sprawling conglomerates such as Lagos in Nigeria, west Africa, which the authors argue are highly functional despite a lack of infrastructure. The authors also examine the influence of shopping habits and the recent rapid growth of cities in China. Critics of the books have criticised Koolhaas for being cynical - as if Western capitalism and globalization demolish all cultural identity - highlighted in the notion expounded in the books that "In the end, there will be little else for us to do but shop". However, such cynicism can alternatively be read as a "realism" about the transformation of cultural life, where airports and even museums (due to finance problems) rely just as much on operating gift shops.  When it comes to transforming these observations into practice, Koolhaas mobilizes what he regards as the omnipotent forces of urbanism into unique design forms and connections organised along the lines of present-day society. Koolhaas continuously incorporates his observations of the contemporary city within his design activities: calling such a condition the 'culture of congestion'. Again, shopping is examined for "intellectual comfort", whilst the unregulated taste and densification of Chinese cities is analysed according to "performance", a criterion involving variables with debatable credibility: density, newness, shape, size, money etc. For example, in his design for the new CCTV headquarters in Beijing (2009), Koolhaas did not opt for the stereotypical skyscraper, often used to symbolise and landmark such government enterprises, but instead designed a series of volumes which not only tie together the numerous departments onto the nebulous site, but also introduced routes (again, the concept of cross-programming) for the general public through the site, allowing them some degree of access to the production procedure. Through his ruthlessly raw approach, Koolhaas hopes to extract the architect from the anxiety of a dead profession and resurrect a contemporary interpretation of the sublime, however fleeting it may be.  In 2003, Content, a 544-page magazine-style book designed by &&& Creative and published by Koolhaas, gives an overview of the last decade of OMA projects including his designs for the Prada shops, the Seattle Public Library, a plan to save Cambridge from Harvard by rechanneling the Charles River, Lagos' future as Earth's third-biggest city, as well as interviews with Martha Stewart and Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown. CANNOTANSWER
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Remment Lucas Koolhaas (; born 17 November 1944) is a Dutch architect, architectural theorist, urbanist and Professor in Practice of Architecture and Urban Design at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University. He is often cited as a representative of Deconstructivism and is the author of Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan.

He is seen by some as one of the truly significant architectural thinkers and urbanists of his generation, by others as a self-important iconoclast. In 2000, Rem Koolhaas won the Pritzker Prize. In 2008, Time put him in their top 100 of The World's Most Influential People. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2014.

Early life and career
Remment Koolhaas, usually abbreviated to Rem Koolhaas, was born on 17 November 1944 in Rotterdam, Netherlands, to Anton Koolhaas (1912–1992) and Selinde Pietertje Roosenburg (born 1920). His father was a novelist, critic, and screenwriter. Two documentary films by Bert Haanstra for which his father wrote the scenarios were nominated for an Academy Award for Documentary Feature, one won a Golden Bear for Short Film. His maternal grandfather, Dirk Roosenburg (1887–1962), was a modernist architect who worked for Hendrik Petrus Berlage, before opening his own practice. Rem Koolhaas has a brother, Thomas, and a sister, Annabel. His paternal cousin was the architect and urban planner Teun Koolhaas (1940–2007). The family lived consecutively in Rotterdam (until 1946), Amsterdam (1946–1952), Jakarta (1952–1955), and Amsterdam (from 1955).

His father strongly supported the Indonesian cause for autonomy from the colonial Dutch in his writing. When the war of independence was won, he was invited over to run a cultural programme for three years and the family moved to Jakarta in 1952. "It was a very important age for me," Koolhaas recalls "and I really lived as an Asian."

In 1969, Koolhaas co-wrote The White Slave, a Dutch film noir, and later wrote an unproduced script for American soft-porn king Russ Meyer.

He was a journalist in 1963 at age 19 for the Haagse Post  before starting studies in architecture in 1968 at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London, followed, in 1972, by further studies with Oswald Mathias Ungers at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, followed by studies at the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in New York City.

Koolhaas first came to public and critical attention with OMA (The Office for Metropolitan Architecture), the office he founded in 1975 together with architects Elia Zenghelis, Zoe Zenghelis and (Koolhaas's wife) Madelon Vriesendorp in London. They were later joined by one of Koolhaas's students, Zaha Hadid – who would soon go on to achieve success in her own right. An early work which would mark their difference from the then dominant postmodern classicism of the late 1970s, was their contribution to the Venice Biennale of 1980, curated by Italian architect Paolo Portoghesi, titled "Presence of the Past". Each architect had to design a stage-like "frontage" to a Potemkin-type internal street; the façades by , Frank Gehry and OMA were the only ones that did not employ Post-Modern architecture motifs or historical references.

Other early critically received (yet unbuilt) projects included the Parc de la Villette, Paris (1982) and the residence for the Prime Minister of Ireland (1979), as well as the Kunsthal in Rotterdam (1992). These schemes would attempt to put into practice many of the findings Koolhaas made in his book Delirious New York (1978), which was written while he was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in New York, directed by Peter Eisenman.

Architectural theory

Delirious New York
Koolhaas's book Delirious New York set the pace for his career. Koolhaas analyzes the "chance-like" nature of city life: "The City is an addictive machine from which there is no escape" "Rem Koolhaas...defined the city as a collection of 'red hot spots'." (Anna Klingmann).  As Koolhaas himself has acknowledged, this approach had already been evident in the Japanese Metabolist Movement in the 1960s and early 1970s.

A key aspect of architecture that Koolhaas interrogates is the "Program": with the rise of modernism in the 20th century the "Program" became the key theme of architectural design. The notion of the Program involves "an act to edit function and human activities" as the pretext of architectural design: epitomised in the maxim form follows function, first popularised by architect Louis Sullivan at the beginning of the 20th century. The notion was first questioned in Delirious New York, in his analysis of high-rise architecture in Manhattan. An early design method derived from such thinking was "cross-programming", introducing unexpected functions in room programmes, such as running tracks in skyscrapers. More recently, Koolhaas unsuccessfully proposed the inclusion of hospital units for the homeless into the Seattle Public Library project (2003).

Project on the city
Koolhaas' next publications were a by-product of his position as professor at Harvard University, in the Design school's "Project on the City"; firstly the 720-page Mutations, followed by The Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping (2002) and The Great Leap Forward (2002).

All three books published student work analysing what others would regard as "non-cities", sprawling conglomerates such as Lagos in Nigeria, west Africa, which the authors argue are highly functional despite a lack of infrastructure. The authors also examine the influence of shopping habits and the recent rapid growth of cities in China. Critics of the books have criticised Koolhaas for being cynical, – as if Western capitalism and globalization demolish all cultural identity – highlighted in the notion expounded in the books that "In the end, there will be little else for us to do but shop". Perhaps such caustic cynicism can be read as a "realism" about the transformation of cultural life, where airports and even museums (due to finance problems) rely just as much on operating gift shops. It does, however, demonstrate one of the architect's characteristic devices for deflecting criticism: attack the client or subject of study after completing the work.

When it comes to transforming these observations into practice, Koolhaas mobilizes what he regards as the omnipotent forces of urbanism into unique design forms and connections organised along the lines of present-day society. Koolhaas continuously incorporates his observations of the contemporary city within his design activities: calling such a condition the ‘culture of congestion’. Again, shopping is examined for "intellectual comfort", whilst the unregulated taste and densification of Chinese cities is analysed according to "performance", a criterion involving variables with debatable credibility: density, newness, shape, size, money etc.

In 2003, Content, a 544-page magazine-style book designed by &&& Creative and published by Koolhaas, gives an overview of the last decade of OMA projects including his designs for the Prada shops, the Seattle Public Library, a plan to save Cambridge from Harvard by rechanneling the Charles River, Lagos' future as Earth's third-biggest city, as well as interviews with Martha Stewart and Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.

Volume Magazine
In 2005, Rem Koolhaas co-founded Volume Magazine together with Mark Wigley and Ole Bouman. Volume Magazine – the collaborative project by Archis (Amsterdam), AMO and C-lab (Columbia University NY) – is a dynamic experimental think tank devoted to the process of spatial and cultural reflexivity. It goes beyond architecture's definition of ‘making buildings’ and reaches out for global views on architecture and design, broader attitudes to social structures, and creating environments to live in. The magazine stands for a journalism which detects and anticipates, is proactive and even pre-emptive – a journalism which uncovers potentialities, rather than covering done deals.

Buildings and projects
In the late nineties he worked on the design for the new headquarters for Universal.

Indeed, online marketing and propaganda has been a hallmark of OMA's rise in the current century. It has also led to pointed criticism, such as the critique by New York Magazine critic Justin Davidson, who found the 2020 Guggenheim exhibition Countryside, the Future "mildly amusing if it weren’t such terrible waste — of attention, of gallery square footage, of resources, talent, and expertise. Bored with being an architect and building things, Koolhaas lets his fingertips graze important topics, genuine insights, and actual lives. He treats them all as ironic bric-a-brac, meaningless souvenirs of his meanderings through a fragile world. How frustrating that the Guggenheim couldn’t force a little more intellectual rigor on this romp."

Architecture, fashion, and theatre
With his Prada projects, Koolhaas ventured into providing architecture for the fleeting world of fashion and with celebrity-studded cachet: not unlike Garnier's Opera, the central space of Koolhaas' Beverly Hills Prada store is occupied by a massive central staircase, ostensibly displaying select wares, but mainly the shoppers themselves. The notion of selling a brand rather than marketing clothes was further emphasised in the Prada store on Broadway in Manhattan, New York, which had previously been owned by the Guggenheim: the museum signs were not removed during the outfitting of the new store, as if emphasizing the premises as a cultural institution. The Broadway Prada store opened in December 2001, cost €32 million to build, and has 2,300 square meters of retail space.

21st Century Projects

Probably the most costly and celebrated OMA projects of the new century were the massive Central China Television Headquarters Building in Beijing, China, and the new building for the Shenzhen Stock Exchange, the equivalent of the NASDAQ in China.

In his design for the new CCTV Headquarters in Beijing (2009), Koolhaas did not opt for the stereotypical skyscraper, often used to symbolise and landmark such government enterprises; he patented a "horizontal skyscraper" in the U.S. The building, popularly called "The Big Pants" by Beijing residents, was designed as a series of volumes which attempt to tie together the numerous departments onto the nebulous site, but also introduce routes (again, the concept of cross-programming) for the general public through the site, allowing them some degree of access to the production procedure. An unfortunate incident that highlighted the folly of the circulation scheme (no effective fire egress for people on the upper floors), was the construction fire that nearly destroyed the building and a nearby hotel in 2009.

Personal life
Koolhaas was previously married to Madelon Vriesendorp, an artist who is the mother of his two children, Charlie, a photographer, and Tomas, a filmmaker. Koolhaas divorced Vriesendorp in 2012. He has known his current partner Petra Blaisse, an interior and landscape designer since 1986.

Selected projects
Villa dall’Ava, (Saint-Cloud, 1991)
Nexus World Housing (Fukuoka, 1991)
Kunsthal (Rotterdam, 1992)
Euralille (Lille, 1994)
Educatorium (Utrecht, 1995)
Maison à Bordeaux (Bordeaux, 1998)
Embassy of the Netherlands (Berlin, 2003)
McCormick Tribune Campus Center (Chicago, 2003)
Seoul National University Museum of Art (Seoul, 2005) 
Seattle Central Library (Seattle, 2005)
Casa da Música (Porto, 2005)
Dee and Charles Wyly Theater (Dallas, 2009)
CCTV Headquarters, (Beijing, 2012)
De Rotterdam (Rotterdam, 2013)
Garage Museum of Contemporary Art (Moscow, 2014)
Qatar National Library (Doha, 2017)
Taipei Performing Arts Center (Taipei, 2022)

Bibliography
Project Japan. Metabolism Talks... (2011) (with Hans Ulrich Obrist) 
Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan (1978) 
S,M,L,XL (1995) 
Serpentine Gallery: 24 Hour Interview Marathon (2007) Living Vivre Leben (1998)Content (2004) 
 Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2006''; Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Köln, Germany 2008

Gallery

See also
Contemporary architecture
World Architecture Survey
List of architects
Koolhaas Houselife

References

External links

 Office for Metropolitan Architecture
 OMA official Facebook page (updated daily)
 OMA official Vimeo channel
 OMA portfolio on Archello.com
 Rem Koolhaas at Harvard University
 
 Urgency 2007: Rem Koolhaas and Peter Eisenman lectures, Canadian Centre for Architecture, June 8, 2007
 Rem Koolhaas in conversation with Mirko Zardini and Giovanna Borasi, Rotterdam, August 26, 2015, for the exhibition The Other Architect, Canadian Centre for Architecture 
 On Starchitecture
 Koolhaas at Harvard's Ecological Urbanism
 Rem Koolhaas: A Kind of Architect (2008 Feature Documentary)
 Rem Koolhaas lecture "Russia for Beginners" at Garage Museum of Contemporary Art: September 15th, 2014
 Rem Koolhaas on Empty Canon

 
1944 births
20th-century Dutch architects
21st-century Dutch architects
Architectural theoreticians
Urban theorists
Deconstructivism
Postmodern architecture
Dutch non-fiction writers
Living people
Cornell University College of Architecture, Art, and Planning alumni
Harvard Graduate School of Design faculty
Dutch urban planners
Architects from Rotterdam
Pritzker Architecture Prize winners
Recipients of the Royal Gold Medal
Chevaliers of the Légion d'honneur
Recipients of the Praemium Imperiale
Alumni of the Architectural Association School of Architecture
Honorary Fellows of the American Institute of Architects
Omnipotent Government: The Rise of the Total State and Total War is a book by Austrian School economist Ludwig von Mises first published in 1944 by Yale University Press. It is one of the most influential writings in Libertarian social thought and critique of statist ideology and socialism, examining the rise of Nazism as an example. The book treats Nazism as a species of orthodox socialist theory.  At the same time the book offers a critique of economic interventionism, industrial central planning, the welfare state, and world government, denouncing the trends of the Western Allies towards the total state. The book was made available online by the Ludwig von Mises Institute in 2004.

Publication history
 Ludwig von Mises, Omnipotent Government: The Rise of the Total State and Total War. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1944.
 Ludwig von Mises, Omnipotent Government: The Rise of the Total State and Total War. New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1969. .
 Ludwig von Mises, Omnipotent Government: The Rise of the Total State and Total War. Spring Mills, PA: Libertarian Press, 1985. .

Reviews
 Basch, Antonin (1944). Review of Ludwig von Mises, Omnipotent Government. The American Economic Review 34.4, 899–903.
 Baster, A. S. J. (1945). Review of Ludwig von Mises, Omnipotent Government. Economica, New Series 12.45, 39–40.
 Coker, Francis W. (1944). Review of Ludwig von Mises, Omnipotent Government; The Rise of the Total State and Total War. The American Political Science Review 38.5, 1003–1005.
 Hessen, Robert (1970). Review of Ludwig von Mises, Omnipotent Government. The Objectivist 9.8.
 Hexner, Ervin (1945). Review of Ludwig von Mises, Omnipotent Government. The Rise of the Total State and Total War. Social Forces 23.4, 466–467.
 Kohn, Hans (1945). Review of Ludwig von Mises, Omnipotent Government: The Rise of the Total State and Total War. The American Historical Review 50.3, 531–533.
 Minshall, T. H. (1947). Review of Ludwig von Mises, Omnipotent Government. The Rise of the Total State and Total War. International Affairs (Royal Institute of International Affairs 1944–) 23.2, 240–241.
 Passant, E. J. (1944). Review of Ludwig von Mises, Omnipotent Government, and Norman Angell, Let the People Know. The Economic Journal 54.215/216, 384–387.
 Robson, Charles B. (1945). Review of Ludwig von Mises, Omnipotent Government; The Rise of the Total State and Total War. The Journal of Politics 7.1, 98–100.
 Rothbard, Murray N. (1975). Reviews of Ludwig von Mises, Omnipotent Government and Theory and History. Libertarian Review, June 1975, p. 1.
 Simons, Henry C.  (1944). Review of Ludwig von Mises, Omnipotent Government: The Rise of the Total State and Total War. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 236, Adolescents in Wartime, pp. 192–193
 Yoder, Fred R. (1944). Review of Ludwig von Mises, The Omnipotent State (sic). American Sociological Review 10:2 (1944), p. 326
 Hula, Erich. (1945). Review of Ludwig von Mises, Omnipotent Government. The Rise of the Total State and Total War. Social Research 12:4 (November 1945), pp. 509–511
 Peardon, T. P. (1945). Review of Ludwig von Mises, Omnipotent Government: The Rise of the Total State and Total War. Political Science Quarterly 60:1 (March 1945), pp. 130–131

Translations
  Ludwig von Mises, Omnipotencia Gubernamental. Translated by Pedro Elgoibar. Mexico: Editorial Hermes, n.d.
  Ludwig von Mises, Le Gouvernement Omnipotent de L`État Totalitaire à la Guerre Total. Translated by M. de Hulster. Paris: Librairie de Médicis, 1947.
  Ludwig von Mises, Im Namen des Staates, oder Die Gefahren des Kollektivismus [In the Name of the State: or the Dangers of Collectivism]. Stuttgart: Bonn Aktuell, 1978. 
  Людвиг фон Мизес, Всемогущее правительство: Тотальное государство и тотальная война. Moscow: Социум, 2006. .

See also
 The Road to Serfdom

References

External links

Full text
 Omnipotent Government, 1944 edition:
 Full text in HTML
 Full text in PDF
 Full text in EPUB

1944 non-fiction books
Books by Ludwig von Mises
Books about economic history
Books about liberalism
Books about Nazism
Books about totalitarianism
Books about capitalism
History books about World War II
Sociology books
Yale University Press books The omnipotence paradox is a family of paradoxes that arise with some understandings of the term omnipotent. The paradox arises, for example, if one assumes that an omnipotent being has no limits and is capable of realizing any outcome, even a logically contradictory one such as creating a square circle. Atheological arguments based on the omnipotence paradox are sometimes described as evidence for countering theism. Other possible resolutions to the paradox hinge on the definition of omnipotence applied and the nature of God regarding this application and whether omnipotence is directed toward God himself or outward toward his external surroundings.

The omnipotence paradox has medieval origins, dating at least to the 10th century, when the Saadia Gaon responded to the question of whether God's omnipotence extended to logical absurdities. It was later addressed by Averroës and Thomas Aquinas. Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (before 532) has a predecessor version of the paradox, asking whether it is possible for God to "deny himself".

The best-known version of the omnipotence paradox is the so-called paradox of the stone: "Could God create a stone so heavy that even He could not lift it?" This phrasing of the omnipotence paradox is vulnerable to objections based on the physical nature of gravity, such as how the weight of an object depends on what the local gravitational field is. Alternative statements of the paradox that do not involve such difficulties include "If given the axioms of Euclidean geometry, can an omnipotent being create a triangle whose angles do not add up to 180 degrees?" and "Can God create a prison so secure that he cannot escape from it?".

Overview 
A common modern version of the omnipotence paradox is expressed in the question: "Can [an omnipotent being] create a stone so heavy that it cannot lift it?" This question generates a dilemma. The being can either create a stone it cannot lift, or it cannot create a stone it cannot lift. If the being  create a stone that it cannot lift, then it is not omnipotent because there is a weight threshold beyond its own power to lift. If the being  create a stone it cannot lift, then there is something it cannot create, and is therefore not omnipotent. In either case, the being is not omnipotent.

A related issue is whether the concept of "logically possible" is different for a world in which omnipotence exists than a world in which omnipotence does not exist.

The dilemma of omnipotence is similar to another classic paradox—the irresistible force paradox: "What would happen if an irresistible force were to meet an immovable object?" One response to this paradox is to disallow its formulation, by saying that if a force is irresistible, then by definition there is no immovable object; or conversely, if an immovable object exists, then by definition no force can be irresistible. Another response to this that the only way out of this paradox is if the irresistible force and immovable object never meet. However this does not hold up under scrutiny, because an object cannot in principle be immovable if a force exists that can in principle move it, regardless of whether the force and the object actually meet.

Types of omnipotence 

Augustine of Hippo in his City of God writes "God is called omnipotent on account of His doing what He wills" and thus proposes the definition that "Y is omnipotent" means "If Y wishes to do X then Y can and does do X". 
 
The notion of omnipotence can also be applied to an entity in different ways. An essentially omnipotent being is an entity that is necessarily omnipotent. In contrast, an accidentally omnipotent being is an entity that can be omnipotent for a temporary period of time, and then becomes non-omnipotent. The omnipotence paradox can be applied to each type of being differently.

In addition, some philosophers have considered the assumption that a being is either omnipotent or non-omnipotent to be a false dilemma, as it neglects the possibility of varying degrees of omnipotence. Some modern approaches to the problem have involved semantic debates over whether language—and therefore philosophy—can meaningfully address the concept of omnipotence itself.

Proposed answers

Omnipotence does not mean breaking the laws of logic 
A common response from Christian philosophers, such as Norman Geisler or William Lane Craig, is that the paradox assumes a wrong definition of omnipotence. Omnipotence, they say, does not mean that God can do anything at all but, rather, that he can do anything that is possible according to his nature. The distinction is important. God cannot perform logical absurdities; he cannot, for instance, make 1+1=3. Likewise, God cannot make a being greater than himself because he is, by definition, the greatest possible being. God is limited in his actions to his nature. The Bible supports this, they assert, in passages such as Hebrews 6:18, which says it is "impossible for God to lie."

A good example of a modern defender of this line of reasoning is George Mavrodes. Essentially, Mavrodes argues that it is no limitation on a being's omnipotence to say that it cannot make a round square. Such a "task" is termed by him a "pseudo-task" as it is self-contradictory and inherently nonsense. Harry Frankfurt—following from Descartes—has responded to this solution with a proposal of his own: that God can create a stone impossible to lift and also lift said stoneFor why should God not be able to perform the task in question? To be sure, it is a task—the task of lifting a stone which He cannot lift—whose description is self-contradictory. But if God is supposed capable of performing one task whose description is self-contradictory—that of creating the problematic stone in the first place—why should He not be supposed capable of performing another—that of lifting the stone? After all, is there any greater trick in performing two logically impossible tasks than there is in performing one?

If a being is accidentally omnipotent, it can resolve the paradox by creating a stone it cannot lift, thereby becoming non-omnipotent. Unlike essentially omnipotent entities, it is possible for an accidentally omnipotent being to be non-omnipotent. This raises the question, however, of whether the being was ever truly omnipotent, or just capable of great power. On the other hand, the ability to voluntarily give up great power is often thought of as central to the notion of the Christian Incarnation.

If a being is essentially omnipotent, then it can also resolve the paradox. The omnipotent being is essentially omnipotent, and therefore it is impossible for it to be non-omnipotent. Further, the omnipotent being can do what is logically impossible—just like the accidentally omnipotent—and have no limitations except the inability to become non-omnipotent. The omnipotent being cannot create a stone it cannot lift.

The omnipotent being cannot create such a stone because its power is equal to itself—thus, removing the omnipotence, for there can only be one omnipotent being, but it nevertheless retains its omnipotence. This solution works even with definition 2—as long as we also know the being is essentially omnipotent rather than accidentally so. However, it is possible for non-omnipotent beings to compromise their own powers, which presents the paradox that non-omnipotent beings can do something (to themselves) which an essentially omnipotent being cannot do (to itself). This was essentially the position Augustine of Hippo took in his The City of God:For He is called omnipotent on account of His doing what He wills, not on account of His suffering what He wills not; for if that should befall Him, He would by no means be omnipotent. Wherefore, He cannot do some things for the very reason that He is omnipotent.

Thus Augustine argued that God could not do anything or create any situation that would, in effect, make God not God.

In a 1955 article in the philosophy journal Mind, J. L. Mackie tried to resolve the paradox by distinguishing between first-order omnipotence (unlimited power to act) and second-order omnipotence (unlimited power to determine what powers to act things shall have). An omnipotent being with both first and second-order omnipotence at a particular time might restrict its own power to act and, henceforth, cease to be omnipotent in either sense. There has been considerable philosophical dispute since Mackie, as to the best way to formulate the paradox of omnipotence in formal logic.

God and logic

Although the most common translation of the noun "Logos" is "Word" other translations have been used. Gordon Clark (1902–1985), a Calvinist theologian and expert on pre-Socratic philosophy, famously translated Logos as "Logic": "In the beginning was the Logic, and the Logic was with God and the Logic was God." He meant to imply by this translation that the laws of logic were derived from God and formed part of Creation, and were therefore not a secular principle imposed on the Christian world view.God obeys the laws of logic because God is eternally logical in the same way that God does not perform evil actions because God is eternally good. So, God, by nature logical and unable to violate the laws of logic, cannot make a boulder so heavy he cannot lift it because that would violate the law of non contradiction by creating an immovable object and an unstoppable force.This raises the question, similar to the Euthyphro Dilemma, of where this law of logic, which God is bound to obey, comes from. According to these theologians (Norman Geisler and William Lane Craig), this law is not a law above God that he assents to but, rather, logic is an eternal part of God's nature, like his omniscience or omnibenevolence.

Paradox is meaningless: the question is sophistry 

Another common response is that since God is supposedly omnipotent, the phrase "could not lift" does not make sense and the paradox is meaningless. This may mean that the complexity involved in rightly understanding omnipotence—contra all the logical details involved in misunderstanding it—is a function of the fact that omnipotence, like infinity, is perceived at all by contrasting reference to those complex and variable things, which it is not. An alternative meaning, however, is that a non-corporeal God cannot lift anything, but can raise it (a linguistic pedantry)—or to use the beliefs of Hindus (that there is one God, who can be manifest as several different beings)  that whilst it is possible for God to do all things, it is not possible for all his incarnations to do them. As such, God could create a stone so heavy that, in one incarnation, he could not lift it, yet could do something that an incarnation that could lift the stone could not.

The lifting a rock paradox (Can God lift a stone larger than he can carry?) uses human characteristics to cover up the main skeletal structure of the question. With these assumptions made, two arguments can stem from it:

Lifting covers up the definition of translation, which means moving something from one point in space to another. With this in mind, the real question would be, "Can God move a rock from one location in space to another that is larger than possible?" For the rock to be unable to move from one space to another, it would have to be larger than space itself. However, it is impossible for a rock to be larger than space, as space always adjusts itself to cover the space of the rock. If the supposed rock was out of space-time dimension, then the question would not make sense—because it would be impossible to move an object from one location in space to another if there is no space to begin with, meaning the faulting is with the logic of the question and not God's capabilities.
The words, "Lift a Stone" are used instead to substitute capability. With this in mind, essentially the question is asking if God is incapable, so the real question would be, "Is God capable of being incapable?" If God is capable of being incapable, it means that He is incapable, because He has the potential to not be able to do something. Conversely, if God is incapable of being incapable, then the two inabilities cancel each other out, making God have the capability to do something.

The act of killing oneself is not applicable to an omnipotent being, since, despite that such an act does involve some power, it also involves a lack of power: the human person who can kill himself is already not indestructible, and, in fact, every agent constituting his environment is more powerful in some ways than himself. In other words, all non-omnipotent agents are concretely synthetic: constructed as contingencies of other, smaller, agents, meaning that they, unlike an omnipotent agent, logically can exist not only in multiple instantiation (by being constructed out of the more basic agents they are made of), but are each bound to a different location in space contra transcendent omnipresence.

C. S. Lewis argues that when talking about omnipotence, referencing "a rock so heavy that God cannot lift it" is nonsense just as much as referencing "a square circle"; that it is not logically coherent in terms of power to think that omnipotence includes the power to do the logically impossible. So asking "Can God create a rock so heavy that even he cannot lift it?" is just as much nonsense as asking "Can God draw a square circle?" The logical contradiction here being God's simultaneous ability and disability in lifting the rock: the statement "God can lift this rock" must have a truth value of either true or false, it cannot possess both. This is justified by observing that for the omnipotent agent to create such a stone, it must already be more powerful than itself: such a stone is too heavy for the omnipotent agent to lift, but the omnipotent agent already can create such a stone; If an omnipotent agent already is more powerful than itself, then it already is just that powerful. This means that its power to create a stone that is too heavy for it to lift is identical to its power to lift that very stone. While this does not quite make complete sense, Lewis wished to stress its implicit point: that even within the attempt to prove that the concept of omnipotence is immediately incoherent, one admits that it is immediately coherent, and that the only difference is that this attempt is forced to admit this despite that the attempt is constituted by a perfectly irrational route to its own unwilling end, with a perfectly irrational set of 'things' included in that end.

In other words, the 'limit' on what omnipotence 'can' do is not a limit on its actual agency, but an epistemological boundary without which omnipotence could not be identified (paradoxically or otherwise) in the first place. In fact, this process is merely a fancier form of the classic Liar Paradox: If I say, "I am a liar", then how can it be true if I am telling the truth therewith, and, if I am telling the truth therewith, then how can I be a liar? So, to think that omnipotence is an epistemological paradox is like failing to recognize that, when taking the statement, 'I am a liar' self-referentially, the statement is reduced to an actual failure to lie. In other words, if one maintains the supposedly 'initial' position that the necessary conception of omnipotence includes the 'power' to compromise both itself and all other identity, and if one concludes from this position that omnipotence is epistemologically incoherent, then one implicitly is asserting that one's own 'initial' position is incoherent. Therefore, the question (and therefore the perceived paradox) is meaningless. Nonsense does not suddenly acquire sense and meaning with the addition of the two words, "God can" before it. Lewis additionally said that, "Unless something is self-evident, nothing can be proved." This implies for the debate on omnipotence that, as in matter, so in the human understanding of truth: it takes no true insight to destroy a perfectly integrated structure, and the effort to destroy has greater effect than an equal effort to build; so, a man is thought a fool who assumes its integrity, and thought an abomination who argues for it. It is easier to teach a fish to swim in outer space than to convince a room full of ignorant fools why it cannot be done.

Paradox assumes the rock has already been created

In 1999, Matthew Whittle asserts that it shouldn't be outside the scope of powers for an omnipotent being to make itself non-omnipotent, so indeed making a rock too heavy to lift is possible for God.  The follow on question "Then can he lift it?" assumes that the rock has already been created, so the correct answer would be "Assuming he makes the rock, no."  And if asked "Is God thus not all powerful?", the correct answer would be "God is indeed all powerful until such time as the rock is created."  The "Paradox" then is not really a paradox.

Language and omnipotence 
The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein is frequently interpreted as arguing that language is not up to the task of describing the kind of power an omnipotent being would have. In his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, he stays generally within the realm of logical positivism until claim 6.4—but at 6.41 and following, he argues that ethics and several other issues are "transcendental" subjects that we cannot examine with language. Wittgenstein also mentions the will, life after death, and God—arguing that, "When the answer cannot be put into words, neither can the question be put into words."

Wittgenstein's work expresses the omnipotence paradox as a problem in semantics—the study of how we give symbols meaning. (The retort "That's only semantics," is a way of saying that a statement only concerns the definitions of words, instead of anything important in the physical world.) According to the Tractatus, then, even attempting to formulate the omnipotence paradox is futile, since language cannot refer to the entities the paradox considers. The final proposition of the Tractatus gives Wittgenstein's dictum for these circumstances: "What we cannot speak of, we must pass over in silence".

Wittgenstein's approach to these problems is influential among other 20th century religious thinkers such as D. Z. Phillips. In his later years, however, Wittgenstein wrote works often interpreted as conflicting with his positions in the Tractatus, and indeed the later Wittgenstein is mainly seen as the leading critic of the early Wittgenstein.

Other versions of the paradox 
In the 6th century, Pseudo-Dionysius claims that a version of the omnipotence paradox constituted the dispute between Paul the Apostle and Elymas the Magician mentioned in Acts 13:8, but it is phrased in terms of a debate as to whether God can "deny himself" ala 2 Tim 2:13. In the 11th century, Anselm of Canterbury argues that there are many things that God cannot do, but that nonetheless he counts as omnipotent.

Thomas Aquinas advanced a version of the omnipotence paradox by asking whether God could create a triangle with internal angles that did not add up to 180 degrees. As Aquinas put it in Summa contra Gentiles:

This can be done on a sphere, and not on a flat surface. The later invention of non-Euclidean geometry does not resolve this question; for one might as well ask, "If given the axioms of Riemannian geometry, can an omnipotent being create a triangle whose angles do not add up to more than 180 degrees?" In either case, the real question is whether an omnipotent being would have the ability to evade consequences that follow logically from a system of axioms that the being created.

A version of the paradox can also be seen in non-theological contexts. A similar problem occurs when accessing legislative or parliamentary sovereignty, which holds a specific legal institution to be omnipotent in legal power, and in particular such an institution's ability to regulate itself.

In a sense, the classic statement of the omnipotence paradox — a rock so heavy that its omnipotent creator cannot lift it — is grounded in Aristotelian science. After all, if we consider the stone's position relative to the sun the planet orbits around, one could hold that the stone is constantly lifted—strained though that interpretation would be in the present context. Modern physics indicates that the choice of phrasing about lifting stones should relate to acceleration; however, this does not in itself of course invalidate the fundamental concept of the generalized omnipotence paradox. However, one could easily modify the classic statement as follows: "An omnipotent being creates a universe that follows the laws of Aristotelian physics. Within this universe, can the omnipotent being create a stone so heavy that the being cannot lift it?"

Ethan Allen's Reason addresses the topics of original sin, theodicy and several others in classic Enlightenment fashion. In Chapter 3, section IV, he notes that "omnipotence itself" could not exempt animal life from mortality, since change and death are defining attributes of such life. He argues, "the one cannot be without the other, any more than there could be a compact number of mountains without valleys, or that I could exist and not exist at the same time, or that God should effect any other contradiction in nature." Labeled by his friends a Deist, Allen accepted the notion of a divine being, though throughout Reason he argues that even a divine being must be circumscribed by logic.

In Principles of Philosophy, Descartes tried refuting the existence of atoms with a variation of this argument, claiming God could not create things so indivisible that he could not divide them.

See also 

Gödel's incompleteness theorems
Problem of evil
List of paradoxes

Notes

References 

Allen, Ethan. Reason: The Only Oracle of Man. J.P. Mendum, Cornill; 1854. Originally published 1784. (Accessed on 19 April 2006)
Augustine. City of God and Christian Doctrine. The Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1890. (Accessed on 26 September 2006)
Burke, James. The Day the Universe Changed. Little, Brown; 1995 (paperback edition). .
Gleick, James. Genius. Pantheon, 1992. .
Haeckel, Ernst. The Riddle of the Universe. Harper and Brothers, 1900.
Hoffman, Joshua, Rosenkrantz, Gary. "Omnipotence" The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2017 Edition). Edward N. Zalta (ed.). (Accessed on 10 March 2020)
Mackie, J. L., "Evil and Omnipotence." Mind LXIV, No, 254 (April 1955).
Wierenga, Edward. "Omnipotence" The Nature of God: An Inquiry into Divine Attributes. Cornell University Press, 1989. (Accessed on 19 April 2006)
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Available online via Project Gutenberg. Accessed 19 April 2006.

Arguments against the existence of God
Philosophical paradoxes
Philosophy of religion
Scholasticism
Theology
Atheism